As to railroad tracks, for me it’s the combination of 70 percent creosote and 30 percent the rocky/dusty ballast. I actually like it.
In my family, we used to have a fake Christmas tree. It was metal and the needles were made of some sort of limp plastic tape. Maybe it was soft because it was always decomposing. It lived in the basement with all the junk and the huge pile of potatoes you had to regularly inspect for rot.
The Christmas smell for me is the basement smell: damp, slightly musty, vaguely organic, but also a little like gasoline. I guess the smell of old video tapes comes close. Every time you’d slide a decoration down one of the branches and disturb the needles, the smell would intensify. We also had clip-on lights with little bulbs that would get very hot, so the first evening when we decorated the tree was truly magical with the warm fragrance of heated plastic and dust.
I didn’t know to most people this is a bad smell. It made me really happy, so even now things that come from basements make me think of Christmas.
I think one year my mother insisted that we get a real tree and she gushed over the smell. Turns out i can hardly smell pine at all and it means nothing to me.
In 1955, we stayed at a motel near Kingston, Ontario. Across the street was a farm, and they had just cut the long, wet grass. I have never forgotten the lovely smell, and have yet to match it exactly. (it was also my first experience with “cowpies”. 
)
When I smell blacktop on a warm day, I am transported back to the summer when I was 8 years old and hiking down a road with a bunch of other day campers, on the way to swim at a back yard pool rented by the camp.
A while back I decided to wash my towels in bleach, as they were starting to smell a little musty. After washing them, they would trigger this smell memory of showering in a motel room whenever I used them. It never occurred to until then that that distinctive smell I’ve noticed on motel towels was the smell of bleach lingering on the fabric.
Exhaust from Greyhound bus. I’m in my 70’s now. but always brings back the day in 1959 my mother & two sisters and I boarded a bus, leaving my father.
Watching out the window as tears rolled down his face.
Right Guard spray deodorant = my dad
Gasoline / oil smell in a garage = my grandmother’s house
…and many more.
But it sometimes works the other way. I can imagine some of these smells without being exposed to them, they’re that well imprinted on my mind.
- I can almost imagine the smell of the yard in the summertime at my grandmother’s house.
- I can also recall (without smelling anything like it) the musty smell of the dog house, a combination of rotted particle board and dog saliva.
- And I can easily recall the scent my mom wore for well over a decade while I was growing up. From time to time I catch a whiff of that on someone out on the world, and go “hey…that reminds me…”
A post was merged into an existing topic: Grundig Posts
I have two:
The smell of the particular paper bags they used at the hobby shop I went to as a kid fills me with happy anticipation for something coming up.
When my daughter played a high school basketball game in the gym of my old school I was immediately sixteen years old again.
I’ve always said smells, scents, aromas - whatever you want to call it are like time machines. I can go back 55 years in time when I smell certain things. Also, I don’t even have to smell it, I can remember the smell. It’s like it’s imprinted in my memory.
When I was a kid there was an old general store a few miles from our cabin. We’d beg our dad to take us there to get treats. We also got to drive the car down the dirt road! The smell of that old store is permanently imprinted in my brain. It was kind of musty (but not a bad musty), you could smell the wooden floor too. Hard to explain but I can smell it just sitting here.
The mixture of smells of lake water, gas, fish, and worms in the old fishing boat.
My Italian grandma’s house always smelled like fried peppers. She’d fry sweet and hot banana peppers and eat them in sandwiches. Just peppers and bread.
A fresh box of crayons smells like the first day of school.
The smell of rain hitting hot pavement makes me think of summers when I was a kid.